You’ve probably heard of life hacking, but what are simple ways you can hack your sales game?
Jean-Édouard Silva and Stephanie Salomonsen are both Account Development Executives at iCIMS. In this episode, they share tools and strategies that have made their lives easier as salespeople. They discuss how team cadences have made an incredible difference for their sales team, actionable tips for making cold calling less awkward, and the perfect balance of automated and personalized content for sales emails.
From sales engagement platforms to leveraging marketing for prospecting emails, the two discuss all the tricks of the trade!
Listen to this episode for answers to questions like:
- How does switching to team cadences completely change the way salespeople prospect?
- What are simple ways to make cold calling less uncomfortable?
- Why do Jean-Édouard and Stephanie trust marketing to have content control over their cadence messaging?
- What is the perfect ratio of scripted vs. personalized content in an email?
- How can sales leverage account-based marketing?
Team Cadence Transformation
Jeremey: Let’s talk a little bit about how you guys approached your sales engagement transformation and how you driven marketing? What was the problem you were solving? Where did this begin?
Jean: Stephanie and I were thankful enough to go to Rainmaker this year, and we came back with a lot of notes. Our overall thought process was that our sales team does a great job of making a great product. The marketing team does a great job telling a great story. Customer support does a great job of supporting customers.
We wanted to do a great job at prospecting and offering our potential new customers a really great prospecting experience. That was our guiding principle and we went back and thought about how does our team currently prospect and how are we using the tools that we have at our disposal?
Sales because it’s our primary tool to prospect for our team. There’s so much more potential that we’re currently not tapping into. We came to the conclusion that letting each SDR manager execute their own individual cadences just wasn’t working for us. We weren’t learning from that content or getting any data back. Every SDR was creating their own content and writing their own cadences mostly off of their own knowledge of how to do it and how to write an email. So it wasn’t efficient.
We weren’t necessarily getting the results that we thought we could be getting. It wasn’t a really great prospecting experience. It wasn’t as consistent as we wanted it to be. Marketing materials weren’t being funneled into the right place. We were just not doing as effective a job as we thought we could be. So we decided right after Salesloft’s conference, that moving over to team cadences was really what was going to help us move forward and deliver a really great prospecting experience.
Internally, we called it our unified cadence strategy of going through a transition period away from individual cadences to team cadences. Therefore, we could all work towards a much better prospecting experience.
Social Steps in Cadences
Jeremey: Have you guys tested cadences that are heavy upfront with social steps?
Jean: That’s the number one feedback we got back from our team once we implemented and launched the new cadences. How well was social is working for them?
First off, because I think it’s unique and that it’s a means of prospecting that didn’t exist before, it’s a great tool for us to kind differentiate to get to know our customers better. We think about building our cadences around how we can help the customer. How can we help them learn more about their industry and what’s going on? How can we solve for a pain that they have, and going through their LinkedIn, getting to know them through what they’re putting out publicly is a great means for us to do that?
Engaging with them through what they’re posting online is really great. We get to know what’s important to them, what they’re thinking of front of mind, and get to know a little bit more about their career. Maybe we know that they used to work at a different company in an industry that we speak well to.
It really helps us guide how we want to position our product to them and it helps us be different in how we prospect compared to everybody else. We seeing really great results.
Stephanie: It’s also providing a really great experience for the team too because it allows us the time to take a breath and really look at our prospects’ LinkedIn pages and get to know them as Jean had said. That way, when we enter into conversations with them, we’re better equipped with information.
It doesn’t feel so much like we’re calling them for the sake of calling them. We know these people a little bit better. We have a little bit of a relationship with them because they’ve seen our faces on LinkedIn. It just makes cold calling so much easier.
Marketing… Creating Sales Messaging?!
Jeremey: I know a lot of sales teams are saying, “I can’t believe you gave content control of cadence messaging over to marketing!”
The primary complaint is that the salesperson is much closer to the customers and know the language that they speak, the language that will resonate with them. Marketing tends to come up with more abstract positioning or language. Was that a concern for you guys? How do you address that?
Stephanie: We just set up a really open conversation with marketing where we asked for help building out the body of our emails. We’ve also been really clear in that we still want our sales team to be able to personalize those emails. What we’re working on now is sharing best practices for writing prospecting emails with our marketing team. We’re so grateful that they were open to hearing that feedback to begin with, and they genuinely do want to learn.
Each email they provide us leaves about 20% room for us to continue to personalize. We’re doing a couple of little updates here and there, which they’re totally open to feedback on. Then, what they’re really interested in seeing are the quick results on how those emails are being received by our prospects.
If you have a passion for the art and the science of sales, are looking to further your career, or just want to hear some great, practical tips, ‘Hey Salespeople’ is the podcast for you. Subscribe so you can follow along as Jeremey interviews the brightest minds in modern sales to bring you immediately actionable advice. Listen and subscribe here.
